Socratic Seminar (Melissa Golio)

Questions:
1. Why would we want students who all think the same? Shouldn’t life experience be part of the curriculum?
2. If children are taught by both relatives and teachers, who is responsible for teaching them right and wrong? Who is to blame if they did do something wrong?
3. Should students, in some sense, become the teachers?
4. How does the “banking system” prepare students for college and the work place?

Passages:

1. “The Child and the Curriculum” pg. 186: “Then studies introduce a world arranged on the basis of eternal and general truth; a world where all is measured and defined. Hence the moral: ignore and minimize the child’s individual peculiarities, whims, and experiences. They are what we need to get away from. They are to be obscured or eliminated. As educators our work is precisely to substitute for these superficial and casual affairs stable and well-ordered realities; and these are found in studies and lessons.”

-This passage is significant, because it shows why students and teachers don’t have a close relationship. When teachers don’t care about who their students are, it is difficult for the students to respect them. By trying to eliminate student’s personalities, it is telling the student that what they think and the way they think doesn’t matter. All that matters is what the teacher is telling them.

2. “The Child and the Curriculum” pg. 187: “The child is the starting-point, the center, and the end. His development, his growth, is the ideal. It alone furnishes the standard. To the growth of the child all studies are subservient; they are instruments valued as they serve the needs of growth. Personality, character, is more than subject-matter. Not knowledge or information, but self-realization, is the goal.”

-Although the ideals portrayed in this passage are a little over the top, they should be followed to an extent in the classroom. If students feel close with their teacher, meaning they feel that they can express themselves and have a voice, they will enjoy that class that much more. No student wants to just sit and be spoken to, they want to have an opinion and they want to express who they are. This passage, which is the way some sects teach, is a little extreme; however it provides teachers and students with the closest relationship.

3. “The Education of Intelligences” pg. 334: “Related to, but separate from, the intelligences involved are actual ways of learning exploited in one or another setting. Perhaps no basic is direct or “unmediated” learning: here the learner observes adult activity in vivo, as when a Puluwat child watches an elder construct a canoe or prepare to sail. Closely related to direct observation but involving more overt participation by the learner, are various forms of imitation, where the child observes and then imitates (either immediately or subsequently) the actions performed by the model.”

-This is very common in most schools, where the teacher will simply spit out information and the students simply write down the information and eventually memorize it. There is little communication between the students and the teacher which does not help build a relationship. Also, this kind of learning prevents students from really comprehending what the teacher is talking about. If discussions were allowed and questions were voiced, there would be a different understanding of the material.

4. Pedagogy of the Oppressed pg. 53: “The raison d’ etre of libertarian education, on the other hand, lies in its drive towards reconciliation. Education must begin with the solution of the teacher student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.

-This kind of idea, that the students and teachers constantly switch positions, promotes a healthy relationship. In all the classes I have taken, where the students were required to voice their opinions and teach what they know, I had a much closer relationship with that teacher. Everything becomes much more personal, because the teacher knows how you think and what interests you.

5. What is English? pg. 204: “The elementary section. Where the story of the wholistic group is complex and slippery, the story that I want to tell about the elementary section is simple (simple to summarize if not to enact). And where the wholistic group was often adversarial in stance, the elementary teachers were not. Though they were straightforward and learned, they nevertheless displayed the highest degree of play, metaphor, imagination, and connection of the cognitive to the affective. They were willing to risk the charge of corniness. They didn’t fight or get annoyed, and they weren’t particularly pushy. But they were an example, they were good colleagues, and they got through to people.”

-The way elementary school teacher’s act is the way all teachers should act, especially in the classroom. Elementary school teachers know that they do not have a long time to get and keep their students attention. They have young children who would much rather be doing something else, so their teachers have to create activities that will keep their attention and at the same time teach them. This creates a bond between the teacher and the students because the students see the teacher as fun and interesting. All teachers should do this because although students in high school and college are older, they would also rather be doing something else than sitting in class. However, if that class was fun and interesting and the students could relate with the teacher, the relationship would be stronger and the class would seem much more interesting.